This may have happened to you as well: yesterday, because of the snowstorm, a lot of events got cancelled. One of those events was the first meeting of my Creativity Course. Dismay, dissapointment, and dammit!s ensued, to say the least. And if that wasn't frustrating enough, I suddenly realized that the cancellation screwed up my whole timetable for introducing the course. Dammit again!
Fortunately, I didn't stay in that space. It gradually dawned on me that I was facing a new creative challenge--not of my own making, of course, but rather something that psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-sent-me-high") would call a "presented problem" (Creativity, p. 95).The challenge was this: How do I revise my plans to introduce the course given the new time constraint?
"Presented problems" are not always welcome; but once they show up, the offer an opportunity to practice some creative and resourceful thinking.
The point is that once I stopped stamping my feet and pouting like a 5-year-old and started playing with the new challenge, the disappointment was forgotten and the juices began flowing once again. Has this ever happened to you? And by the way, it also helped that I rewarded myself by making a nice cup of hot chocolate!
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